Rodrigo Gutierrez-Bravo investigates a number of word order phenomenon in Spanish, concentrating on the language's unmarked word order and the perturbations of this order that result from topicalization and wh-movement. He demonstrates that word order in Spanish is not regulated by licensing conditions related to the subject (ie Case, agreement, etc), but rather results from the interaction between the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and structural markedness considerations. He proposes that Spanish clauses have different degrees of structural markedness, depending on the semantic role of...

Bernd Heine argues that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. The author uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns. Using grammaticalization theory Heine describes how each affects the word order and morphosyntax of the resulting possessive construction.

Professor Samuels presents a comprehensive explanation of the reasons for linguistic change, applying his theory in particular to the history of English. He assesses and mediates between the conflicting dogmas of different schools of linguistics, and offers an alternative theory of linguistic change which is basically simple but has the scope to cover any type of change.

This study provides a unified analysis of reduplication, a highly complex word formation process, in Afrikaans. Botha concludes that the reduplication principles at work in Afrikaans are not unique to that tongue and, in fact, that they are used by many other languages. Furthermore, Botha shows that neither special conceptual structures nor even standard reduplication procedures are needed to interpret Afrikaans reduplication, thus supporting recent work in cognition by Ray Jackendoff and other scholars. The book's analysis provides concrete illustration of Galilean linguistic inquiry at work...

In this provocative work, Luigi Burzio argues that many common assumptions within stress theory, and phonological theory more generally, are in fact rather arbitrary. He proposes radical departures from recent tradition. In Part I he analyzes stress in the underived English lexicon, arguing that the basic accentual groups or "feet" are not monosyllabic or bisyllabic, as often assumed, but rather bisyllabic or trisyllabic. This analysis brings significant simplifications to other recent theorizing, including the elimination of standard extrametrically and all rules destressing. In Part II...

In this examination of the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, Paul Gorrell argues for a distinct processing component that is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and that utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a GovernmentSHBinding grammar. He contrasts the primary and secondary relations in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this distinction is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, a model that can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.

Henry Smith develops a theory of syntactic case and examines its synchronic and diachronic consequences. Within a unification-based framework, he draws out pervasive patterns in the relationship between morphosyntax "linking" and grammatical function. Beginning with a detailed study of dative substitution in Icelandic, the author moves on to examine a wide array of synchronic and diachronic data and to construct a typology of case.

In this new book Liliane Haegeman presents an account of sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework. Building on the work of Klima and Lasnik, Haegeman demonstrates the parallelism between negative sentences and interrogative sentences, and gives a unified analysis in terms of a well-formedness condition on syntactic representations: the AFFECT criterion, instantiated as the WH criterion in interrogative sentences and as the NEG criterion in negative sentences. It is shown that in the same way that in many languages the WH criterion gives rise to WH movement, the NEG...

This book reviews current theories of the sound-structure of words and syllables. Dr. Coleman presents technical arguments showing that the contemporary theories are too complex and that a simpler theory, Declarative Phonology, is adequate. This theory is exemplified with detailed accounts of the sound-structure of words and syllables in English and Japanese.

This book analyzes some differences among English, Scottish and American accents of English, and shows how they developed and why they have their current form. Although the revised version of lexical phonology presented here is intended to describe present-day patterns, it can also show how historical sound changes gave rise to these patterns.